To free yourself from your past mistakes you must first learn to forgive yourself. The life lessons from our mistakes make us who we are today.
Many of us hate that part of ourselves and repeatedly bargain our emotional well-being toward paying for those mistakes.
How do we learn if we never fail? We aren’t naturally born with all the wisdom that we will ever need in one lifetime.
Wisdom comes from the results of life. Insight from the experiences of ourselves and others before us.
Sometimes wisdom comes with a higher price than it is bargained for. The greater the insight the higher the price.
Life has an interesting way of picking out certain experiences for you, some things may seem out of your control, but realize that everything in life does exactly happen for a reason even if it does not match your understanding.
Be kind to yourself
It is easy to appreciate the good traits that we have, what about the darker side, the side we hide from the world?
The side that when we recall, tends to bring us shame and guilt. The side that makes us feel weak and vulnerable.
There is always a side of us that we wish was different, that we want to even hide from ourselves at times.
I believe that many of us aren’t really as weak or shameful as we think we are. I think that there are times we go through life where we just weren’t equipped with the right experience or certain knowledge to overcome certain things.
We all did the best we could at that moment, even if it wasn’t our best moment.
Just because you weren’t ready for those painful past experiences does not presently make you a loser or unlovable.
We have to remember that life is a big journey that is made up of little experiences from our day today.
As a person, you can only grow and evolve when you experience what life has to offer. The flavors of life are joy, love, sorrow, and pain. Indeed, it is not fair that you can’t handpick from life what to get to experience.
But there is a certain point in one’s life that you gain enough wisdom and experience that you have enough inner strength and power to choose what experiences get to have access to you.
Click here to learn more about how you can be kind to yourself and on self-love.
Your mistakes do not determine your worth
It does not matter who you were yesterday, 1 year ago, or even 5 years ago.
Who do you want to be today, right now?
Do not limit yourself to who you were, that is the past of yesterday. Tell me who you are today and live it.
No one has a right to tell you who you are, you show the world who you are. You believe it and live it through action.
Even if people don’t believe you, they will eventually respect you. Perseverance and endurance always meet up with success and respect.
You might not have a past that you are proud of, maybe there are times in your life you played a different person.
Maybe people ended up getting hurt because of you. The past can hurt if we think too much.
If you regret the past, then live who you were always meant to be today. You have that right and the option to be who you want to be.
Don’t worry about what people will think or say. That is not your problem.
Your responsibility is to live the most authentic life you were always made to live.
You deserve love, acceptance, and respect as anyone else in this world.
You might have made some mistakes mess up along the way, and I am sure you had paid for those mistakes in regret and sorrow.
Now is not the time to live in victimhood. If you had enough time to grieve you need to pick yourself up and set over again.
When mistakes bring on guilt and shame
We are a lot harder on ourselves than anyone else. When we experience personal shortcomings, we take them to heart and take on the feelings of shame and guilt.
Guilt is self-blame for the responsibility of a regretted mistake or action while shame is a negative emotion of being inadequate.
Many people can spend their whole lives living with guilt and shame while hiding it from the outside world.
The more we keep feelings of guilt and shame to ourselves is the lonelier and more miserable we become.
Let go of guilt and shame by talking it out. If you don’t have someone you feel safe with your feelings, then you need to seek the help of a professional.
This should be at your own comfort level. If you feel more comfortable writing it out in a journal or crying it out, then do so. There is no one correct way.
The point of this is to release these negative emotions in a way that it does not constantly limit you from living a happy and full life.
Start over and reinvent yourself
Starting over can be scary, but so can living your life out in misery for the rest of your life.
Do not let your mistakes limit you from that happiness you dream of.
It’s okay to reflect on your mistakes as a guild, but don’t let your mistakes partake in your future. Accept your mistakes, accept who you were when you made them, then let it go.
Only by experiencing a mistake would you have been able to determine that it was in fact a mistake.
Some things in life we cannot control, what we can control is how we let negative experiences affect us and our present lives.
Every day you wake up is a fresh new beginning. Wake up with a fresh mindset and seize this brand-new opportunity.
